Print tree to show circular relationships

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#1

Hello everyone -

“Circular” might not be the right term. My database has grown to the point where there are several instances of a family splitting and then coming back together. I would like to find a way to produce a PDF (or something) that graphically illustrates these occurrences.

Here is an example, using the Deep Connections Gramplet and a bit of added description:

John Thomas Williford (1878-1951) married Frances Wilmina Sturgeon (1875-1956). They had one child who is my third cousin twice removed. Sadly, the child only lived 4 days.

John Thomas Williford is my second cousin three times removed. His line goes back to David Huffman (1795-1843) and Elizabeth Kaiser (1797-1848) and then comes forward through the Perrys and Cundiffs.

Frances Wilmina Sturgeon is the daughter of Barbara Ann Frock. Barbara’s brother John married Mary Owen Cundiff who is my great aunt.

Looking for relationship between
Gee, William Richard (Home Person) and
Sturgeon, Frances Wilmina (Active Person)…
Found relation #1:
Sturgeon, Frances Wilmina
child of Frock, Barbara Ann
sibling of Frock, John
husband of Cundiff, Mary Owen [great grandaunt]
sibling of Cundiff, George Alfred Colwell [great grandfather]
father of Cundiff, Lucinda Frances [grandmother]
mother of Blanke, Jeanette Irene [mother]
mother of Gee, William Richard

Looking for relationship between
Gee, William Richard (Home Person) and
Williford, John Thomas (Active Person)…
Found relation #1:
Williford, John Thomas [second cousin three times removed (up)]
child of Huffmon, Mary Elizabeth [first cousin four times removed (up)]
child of Huffmon, Samuel [third great granduncle]
sibling of Huffman, Mary Ann Maty [third great grandmother]
mother of Perry, Edward Edmond [second great grandfather]
father of Perry, Laura Malinda [great grandmother]
mother of Cundiff, Lucinda Frances [grandmother]
mother of Blanke, Jeanette Irene [mother]
mother of Gee, William Richard

Is there some filter magic that I can use to get a set of people for printing a graphical tree report?

Gramps 5.1.2 running on Fedora 32.

Thanks!

Bill Gee

#2

Try bookmarking a few people of interest (including yourself) and then run the Relationship Graph using the filter “Relationship path between bookmarked persons”.

#3

I’m looking into trying to create some kind of Node/Edge export or convertion from json/xml/csv to use with software like OpenRefine, Gephi, Cytoscape, Constellation or even Draw.io-deskopt or Grapviz to do something like that…

With Excel Power Query, its possible to create worksheets for Nodes and Edges based on the CSV export from Gramps, I think that will be enough to create a clean network graph in Cytoscape, Constellation or Gephi…

There are another tool I have found now to, that creates Graphviz Graphs directly in Excel, It is a VBA Addon that use its own workbook, so I have not tested if its possible to import the Gramps CSV file to this yet…
If you are interested, here is the link to this tool: https://sourceforge.net/projects/relationship-visualizer/

it might be that this can help you as a workaround…
Warning: Remember that Excel only can load approx 1 million rows in total, so if your database are large you need to filter the export, or split the CSV since all data in the CSV is imported into one worksheet in Excel.
It is possible to use Power Query or the normal import (import to datamodel) to get around all this, but that you need to find tutorials for, it inlcudes using the internal datamodel…
(and I dont think the graph would be usable with so many noeds and edges inside excel…)
…

It would have been great if there was a network graph view for this type of crossings, maybe a amrked path or something…

…
It might also be that you can use the Quill View for this, I have not tested it…

#4

I have experimented with the following approach:

  • export to Gramps xml format (uncompressed)

  • use XSLT to rearrange the data into graphml format

  • use a tool such as yEd to view the graphml file

I would not do this for family tree graphs, since Gramps already has so many good capabilities. Rather, the approach could be used to try other kinds of graphs. Anything can be defined as a “node” or an “edge”. For example, the nodes in the graph could represent people and places, and the edges could represent the events that relate the people to the places. The size, color, etc. of the nodes and edges can signify other variables. Graphs can also be nested.

Tools such as yEd and others will also do some automatic clustering of data in graphs. I have tried using that to make some sense of my DNA matches (importing the csv files directly into yEd).

#5

I totally forgot about yEd when I listed the Graph tools… (shame on me :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:)

You do know that yEd can import gedcom directly?
I have not tested all the variants of graphs that can be used with a gedcom import, but it should be possible to create a lot of different views in yEd that way…

…

I do agree with you in what you write…

I’m researching more than just lineage-linked data, so for me a customable network graph containing people, events, places and Citations would be helpfull, but I think that is a little out of the scope of Gramps…
I’m not a developer, but I want to try to learn some Python to be able to create som alternative views/reports, or import/export of data… It is going slowly, so it will take a long time I’m agraid… lol…
…
Just yesterday I was wondering if it was possible to also create an excel to graphml macro, or a converter in python for the json or xml from Gramps…

#6

Thanks George - That was the hint I needed. It took some fiddling to get all the parameters right, but I finally wound up with something I think is usable.

It’s not perfect, but it works.

I found something that might have to be a feature request. It is very easy to ADD a bookmark by choosing a person in the People view, then typing Ctrl-D. There is no way I found that can remove a bookmark in a single keystroke. You have to go to the bookmark manager to do that.

#7

Yes, what I do is to create a filter that selects the people who I want on the chart. Usually this is the filter “Relationship path between persons” plus some other rules. I haven’t tried the bookmark approach, but will try to remember that for next time.
Then run a relationship graph to chart the people selected by that filter. This can be printed to pdf, or exported to svg or graphviz for further editing.

#8

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